When democracy dies not in darkness but in dysfunction

Book review of 'Democracy and its crisis'

DEMOCRACY AND ITS CRISIS   

A C Grayling

Oneworld 

225 pages; $22.99

A C Grayling, a British philosopher and critic whose subjects range from 17th-century epistemology to 20th-century war crimes, has come to tell us what he knows: That at one time we admired and understood representative democracy, and not without reason, but that in the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, democracy has been “made to fail.” Why has this happened? Because of insufficient checks on the power of political and economic elites, a failure in the civic education required of an informed populace and the ideological distortions created